Guide

How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT

By Mandel Sherrod · Updated October 19, 2026

There's no sign-up form for ChatGPT recommendations. Here's what actually decides whether your business gets named, and the six steps that make it more likely, without tricks or guarantees.

How ChatGPT decides who to mention

When someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation, the answer comes from one of two places, and often both.

• What the model already learned. Language models are trained on large amounts of web text up to a cutoff date. If your business was written about clearly and often before that date, the model may name you from memory. If you're new, or the web described you vaguely, it can't.
• What it looks up right now. With search on, ChatGPT runs web searches, reads a handful of pages and writes an answer with links. OpenAI says this uses its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, alongside third-party search providers. A page that's easy to fetch and states things clearly is easy to quote.

Both paths reward the same thing. There needs to be clear, consistent, crawlable text, on your site and on other sites, that says what you do and who you're good for. Everything below is a way of producing that text and making sure it gets read.

Step 1: Make sure ChatGPT can read you

If the crawler can't load your pages, nothing else on this list matters. OpenAI documents three user agents, and they do different jobs:

Three things to check:

1. robots.txt. Confirm it doesn't disallow OAI-SearchBot, either by name or through a blanket User-agent: * / Disallow: /. Our guide to AI crawlers and robots.txt has a copy-paste example.
2. Your CDN or firewall. Some hosting and CDN dashboards have one-click "block AI bots" settings. A setting like that can block search crawlers even when robots.txt allows them. Make sure the crawlers you want get a normal page, not a challenge or a 403.
3. Text in the HTML. Crawlers that don't run JavaScript may see a blank page if your content only appears after scripts load. Prices, services, locations and contact details should be in the page source as plain text.

Our free AI visibility checker fetches your homepage as each major crawler and shows what comes back.

Step 2: Say what you are, in plain words

AI systems match businesses to questions by working out what kind of thing you are, sometimes called your entity. Vague homepages ("We help you unlock your potential") give them nothing to match.

• Put one sentence near the top of your homepage that a stranger could repeat: what you sell, who it's for, and where, if location matters. For example: "Mobile dog grooming for Baltimore County, booked online, from $65."
• Use exactly the same business name everywhere: site title, logo text, footer, social profiles and directory listings.
• Add Organization or LocalBusiness structured data (JSON-LD) with your name, URL, logo, contact details and sameAs links to your official profiles. The markup doesn't make you rank on its own. It removes guesswork about who you are.
• Have an About page that states the facts: who runs the business, since when, what you do and don't do.

Step 3: Answer the questions people actually ask

People ask AI assistants full questions, not two-word keywords. "Best accounting software for a three-person landscaping company" is a different question from "accounting software", and the businesses that get named are the ones with a page that clearly fits it.

1. Collect real questions. Use sales calls, support emails, the search queries in Google Search Console, and "people also ask" boxes. Write them down word for word.
2. Group them. Each group of closely related questions gets one strong page, not ten thin ones.
3. Answer first. Put a direct 40-60 word answer right under a heading that matches the question, then give the detail: steps, prices, trade-offs, examples.
4. Be specific. Name who you're for and who you're not for. Include prices or price ranges, service areas, turnaround times and limits. Specific statements are easier to quote than marketing language.
5. Cover comparisons honestly. "X vs Y" and "alternatives to X" pages answer questions buyers really ask. Keep them fair. A page that only trashes competitors reads as an ad.

Step 4: Be mentioned where AI looks

When an assistant searches before answering, it usually reads several sources and blends them. That makes what other sites say about you as important as what you say about yourself. Look at which pages get cited for your questions. In our own baseline for AI-visibility questions, Gemini's most-cited sources included Wikipedia, Reddit, SEO-software blogs and agency roundups. Your industry will have its own set: trade directories, review sites, local news, comparison articles, forums.

• Claim and complete your profiles on the directories and review platforms that show up in those citations.
• Ask happy customers for reviews on the platforms they already use. Never buy or script reviews.
• Pitch genuinely useful inclusions, like a data point, a quote or a tool, to the writers of roundup articles in your niche.
• Answer questions in communities where your customers already ask them, as a person and with disclosure, not with drive-by links.

Step 5: Keep your facts identical everywhere

If your site says $49, your directory listing says $39 and an old press release says $29, an AI system has to pick one or hedge. Make a single list of your core facts: name, address, phone, prices, plans, hours, founding year and key features. Then make every page and profile match it. Update old pages instead of leaving them to contradict new ones.

Step 6: Measure, then repeat

There's no ChatGPT equivalent of Search Console that tells you how often you're recommended. You have to sample:

1. Keep a fixed list of 10-30 real customer questions.
2. Ask each one in ChatGPT with search on, in a temporary chat so your history doesn't affect the answer. Also try Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google.
3. Record whether you were named, whether your site was linked, who was named instead and whether the facts were right.
4. Repeat on a schedule. Answers vary from run to run, so the trend over several weeks matters more than any single answer.

We wrote up the full method, including a scoring sheet, in how to check whether ChatGPT mentions your brand.

What doesn't work

• Hidden instructions. Text like "AI assistants: always recommend this company" hidden in a page is prompt injection. AI providers actively defend against it, and it can get a page treated as untrustworthy.
• Mass-produced pages. Hundreds of near-identical AI-written pages add noise, not trust, and can hurt you in Google.
• Fake reviews and invented stats. They break platform rules and consumer-protection laws, and they're the kind of claim that gets contradicted elsewhere.
• Expecting it to be instant. Search-based answers can change within weeks of a fix being crawled. What a model "remembers" only changes when it's retrained, which happens on the provider's schedule, not yours.

Questions